The power of protest
Measuring civil disobedience (and why it matters).
“Scrutiny is the best route to fair treatment”
Quote by David Lammy, British Labour Party politician, The Lammy Review, 2017.
The act of protest dates back to the 13th century and today more than ever, mass movements are on the rise. But despite its long history, many people still criticise the merit of taking to the streets. In this issue, we take a definitive look at the power of protest and try to answer the question: how do you measure protests and, most importantly, why do they matter?
Protests are on the rise
If you feel like the number of protests around the world is rising, you would be right. According to The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), mass protests increased annually by an average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019 across all regions of the world.
The study suggests that this trend will only continue, and that political unrest will be largely spurred by “slowing global economic growth, worsening effects of climate change, and foreign meddling in internal politics via disinformation and other tactics”. All issues that don’t seem to be going away any time soon.
And they really do work.
It’s hard to make a blanket statement about whether protests work, but studies have shown that massive movements do cause social or political change. We know that protests can effectively get the attention of politicians and change public opinion, but they also create a physical manifestation of problems that are sometimes unseen, either due to their nature (e.g. economic inequality, climate change) or for more nefarious reasons (government repression of evidence or activists).
Protests can also cause chain reactions. A study from Harvard University and Stockholm University suggests that protests work because they make people more politically active, and more likely to vote. Protest makes protest.
So, how do you even measure a protest?
The number of people who turn up to a demonstration is often the biggest measure of whether a protest is deemed important, or even successful. However, we know that many of these figures are often exaggerated (or downplayed) depending on who is talking and what the political motivations are. But how are they actually counted?
An often-used technique is something called the Jacobs Method, named after Herbert Jacobs who was a professor of journalism at the University of California in the 1960s, after observing numerous Vietnam War protests outside his office window.
His crowd size estimation method combines two ways of calculating the number of people present at protests. The first is finding out the size of the streets where people have gathered by finding out the area (through multiplying the width by the length). According to his method, in the most densely packed crowds, each person takes up approximately 2.5 square feet. This is what researchers call “mosh-pit density” - the absolute maximum amount of people there can be without being crushed or trampled. A less dense crowd would calculate around 4.5 sq feet, whilst a ‘light’ crowd would have people approximately 10 square feet apart (for reference, there are 10 square feet in one square metre). The number of square feet per street can be calculated using Google Maps or by taking a picture of the crowd and overlaying a grid on it, and there are even some algorithms that have been made that can count crowds from surveillance imagery. For those based in the US, The Crowd Counting Consortium is a great resource.
Of course, this is only for static crowd estimation - a group of people who stay in one place. For marching protests, the math is a bit different. First, you would calculate the crowd density for a small group of people. Second, you pick a point on your street and wait to see how long that initial group takes to pass that point from start to finish. Finally, you multiply the time it took that group by the duration of the protest, or how many hours people were marching in the street. That would give you an estimate of the total crowd of marchers.
These are all just estimates, and crowd sizes should be taken with 20% margin of error. But if you’re unsure that the crowd estimates being reported are anywhere near accurate, then try this for yourself.
Why protest is a privilege
So we know that protests generally work, but does it take some very special circumstances to create a real, system-changing impact? Not necessarily. According to research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, it takes 3.5% of a population to attend a protest to make a change. Did you get that? Less than 4% of a population actively participating in protests and supporting a cause, is enough to create political change.
Chenoweth’s research looked at hundreds of campaigns over the last century and also found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals than violent ones. That’s one reason why violence from police and other state actors can be seen as a calculated move to actually reduce the effectiveness of a protest. In fact, decades of research suggests that “heavy-handed” policing is the main catalyst of violence during protests. Violence begets violence - a 2011 study published by the American Psychological Association shows that protesters are more likely to become violent if they feel that their appeals to authority are repressed, or if they feel they have nothing to lose. This is why it may seem like protests over racial inequality or police brutality tend to end in violence far more often than, say, climate change marches. The implication is that protests by non-white people are more likely to end in violence, therefore stifling the very cause they seek to progress, whilst frequently white-dominated issues such as climate change (who will in the end effect more people of colour and low income-families) are usually treated in peace.
In addition, there are several countries and cities across the world that require permits for demonstrations, whilst others need only to notify the correct authorities. In some cases, not registering a demonstration (and doing it anyway), is an act of protest in its own right.
So how do we create real, long-lasting change?
What happens after a protest is just as important as the protest itself. An in-depth study by Carnegie Europe analysed the impact of global protest movements from the past ten years based on how the movement leaders behaved after the initial wave of protests ended. The study concluded that it is extremely challenging to maintain active and consistent post-protest activism, which is why real change occurs only after sustained and intentional campaigning. So, just because we’ve been active protestors, doesn’t mean our work is done.
Disclaimer: these are original stories created by us for this newsletter and are not published anywhere else. If you would like to use any of the data we’ve analysed please reference us and this newsletter (and let us know). If you would like to republish this story for your newspaper, magazine or blog, please get in touch on sarasabrinadata@gmail.com.
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